


you could still be what you want to be, what you said you were

by zach_stone



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Character Study, Coming Out, Emotional Healing, First Kiss, Flashbacks, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Let Him Run!!, Love Confessions, M/M, Mutual Pining, Panic Attacks, Post-IT (2017), Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), Self-Discovery, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:40:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23270080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zach_stone/pseuds/zach_stone
Summary: In 1989, they fought the clown and Eddie learned how to be brave and take his life back for himself. In 2016, they killed the clown for good and he has to learn it all over again. An Eddie Kaspbrak character study about becoming your true self and falling in love with your best friend (twice).
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 121
Kudos: 503





	1. Just breathe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO i've been thinkin on this fic for a little while now and i've decided in this time of quarantine where i have more free time to write now lmao i might as well start posting it! this is the first of 4 chapters. 
> 
> fic title is from medicine by daughter.
> 
> CONTENT WARNINGS for this chapter: sonia's manipulation/general shittiness, panic attacks, discussion of eddie and myra's marriage being toxic/unhealthy

**1989**

“They’re probably panic attacks,” Stan says thoughtfully, folding his hands in his lap. “I get them too sometimes. It’s not a big deal.”

Eddie looks at him, wide-eyed at this new information. “Oh,” he says. For all his near-encyclopedic knowledge of various illnesses, ailments, diseases, and infections, he’s never been one for psychology, so this is new territory. All he really knows is what his mother’s told him about people with problems in their brains — they’re weak-minded, she says, _not like you, Eddie-bear._ As much as she’s always wanted him to believe he’s frail, it’s physical weakness that she focuses on. The thought of being sick in the _head —_ well, Eddie’s mother has plenty of unkind things to say about people like _that._

But here’s Stan, one of Eddie’s best friends, sitting beside him on the library steps while they wait for the rest of their friends to show up, and Stan is smart and understanding, and if he has panic attacks too, then it must be all right. 

“I can teach you some breathing exercises, if you want,” Stan says. “For next time. So you don’t have to use your inhaler.” 

Eddie scratches at the place where the end of his cast meets his hand, and then he nods. “Yeah, okay.” 

Stan walks him through a simple exercise, and at first it freaks Eddie out a little, to make himself so conscious of his own breath — he’s _always_ conscious of his breath, but not like this, not in a way that’s not just ratcheting up the levels of terror flooding his system and squeezing his lungs. This, once he stops being so unsettled by it, is very relaxing. Eddie almost feels sleepy with it. 

Stan gives him a little smile. “You got it,” he says, nodding. 

The sound of bikes clattering against the sidewalk makes both of them look up, and they see Richie, Bill, and Ben throwing their bikes down at the edge of the library lawn. Stan pulls a face, his nose scrunching up in disapproval.

“Can’t you lock up your bikes like decent people?” he calls as their friends approach. 

“’Fraid not, Stan the Man,” Richie says mournfully. “Big Bill here’s trying to get arrested for public indecency, and who am I to crush his dreams?” 

“You’re such a fucking moron, Richie,” Stan says, rolling his eyes. 

“I don’t think you get arrested for public indecency because you don’t lock up your bike,” Ben says, brow furrowing.

Richie leers at him and swings an arm around his shoulders. “No, you get it for whipping out your —”

“Hey guys!” Mike calls, and they all turn around. Mike is stopping his bike beside the pile on the lawn. He eyes the fallen bikes for a moment before wheeling his a little further up to the rack where Stan and Eddie locked up theirs. 

“Mike, you’re the only person I respect,” Stan tells him. Mike smiles, pleased, and Eddie thumps Stan on the arm.

“What the fuck, I locked up my bike too!” 

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t have if you showed up with these bozos,” Stan points out. 

Eddie can’t exactly argue with him there, so he just rolls his eyes and stands up, dusting off the seat of his pants. They all stand around on the steps for a moment before they seem to realize as one that they’re not waiting for anyone else. 

“I miss Beverly,” Ben says, voicing what they’re all thinking. A wistful melancholy settles over the group. Eddie meets Richie’s eyes from across the little semicircle of their friends, and Richie smiles slightly and flips him off. Eddie scoffs and returns the gesture, which only seems to delight Richie further. Eddie can’t really focus on being sad about Bev moving away when Richie’s being an idiot, and he feels his cheeks heating up with the same flustered warmth that burns through him whenever Richie does shit like this.

They all head into the library, and as they walk up the steps, Stan nudges Eddie and gives him a knowing little nod. Eddie smiles slightly and nods back. He feels secure, with this new knowledge that Stan’s shared. Eddie’s always liked to be prepared, and he feels like now he really is. 

He feels less certain of this some hours later, locked in his room with his back against the door, his chest too tight, wheezing in shallow breaths. His mother is on the other side, not rattling the knob or trying to break the door down, but doing something much worse — she’s wheedling, pleading with him, shifting between anger and concern that he knows isn’t real. 

It all started because she asked him again to go and get his pill caddy and fanny pack from where he’d left it outside Neibolt. She’s been asking him often over the past week, no matter how many times he refuses. The conversation started the same as it always did:

“Eddie-bear, it’s not good for you to stop taking your medicine all at once like this, you have to go get your pills back. They were expensive, you don’t want to waste money, do you?”

“I’m not getting them, Ma,” Eddie said, poking at his dinner with his fork. “I don’t need them.” 

“Eddie, sweetie, you do,” his mother said. And then things took a turn, because she pulled something out of her pocket and set it on the table in front of him. It was an inhaler. He stared at it, his eyes widening, his fingers twitching with simultaneous impulses to chuck it away and clutch at it desperately. 

“Mommy, I don’t need this,” Eddie insisted, his voice less certain.

Sonia Kaspbrak was very skilled at picking up on his moments of weakness. “But it will make you feel better to carry it,” she said. “You know it will, Eddie.” 

Eddie could feel his heart starting to pound, his breath starting to come quick and shallow. “No,” he said, shaking his head, but he curled his fingers around the inhaler anyway. “You have to stop,” he said, not knowing if he meant his mother or himself.

“Eddie, why do you want to hurt me like this?” 

Eddie shoved back his chair and stood up, still clutching the inhaler in his fist. “Just stop, Ma! Stop it!” he yelled, and then he bolted up the stairs and into his room, locking the door behind him. He always thought it was a miracle his mother let him have a lock on his door at all. 

And now he’s sitting, listening to his mother plead and threaten at turns, the plastic of the inhaler digging marks into his palm. He’s gasping for air, his knees tucked up to his chest. He can’t even process whatever it is his mother is saying — all he can think is that he’s going to die if he can’t breathe. His brain will shut down from lack of oxygen and then he’ll die. Almost unconsciously, he starts to shake the inhaler.

His mother must hear it, the telltale noise, even through the door. She stops whatever she was saying and says instead, too sweetly, “That’s right, sweetie, you need to use your inhaler. You’ll feel better.” 

Eddie freezes with the inhaler halfway to his mouth. He tries, instead, to remember the breathing technique Stan taught him earlier. _Put your hand on your stomach,_ Stan had said. _That’s where you should be breathing from._ Eddie puts down the inhaler and presses his palm against his stomach. _Breathe in through your nose, and then breathe out through your mouth, but big, like this._ Stan had sighed audibly with his exhale. Eddie tries now, breathing in, but it feels like it’s catching in his chest. He can’t focus, not with his mother right there, not with the inhaler at his feet. 

He picks it up and triggers it into his mouth. From the other side of the door, he hears his mother sigh in relief. “That’s good, Eddie-bear. Don’t you know I’m just doing what’s best for you?” 

_No, you’re fucking not,_ he thinks. He doesn’t say anything. He waits until he hears her footsteps leaving, until he hears the creak of the stairs as she goes back down. Then he pushes himself to his feet, his chest still feeling tight but his lungs a little less constricted. He eyes his bedroom window. He knows he can get out by climbing down the tree, Richie has snuck in and out that way dozens of times, but Eddie’s never done it with only one arm before. 

As soon as he thinks about Richie, though, Eddie is struck with the overwhelming need to see him. Richie will make him feel better, he thinks. All of this will feel less scary if Richie’s there. Gritting his teeth with determination, he shoves his inhaler into the pocket of his shorts and shoves open his bedroom window. He feels like a tightly coiled spring, or a rubber band stretched too far and about to snap. Everything is too much, too tense, but somehow he’s able to clamber out onto the widest of the branches outside his window and swing down onto the ground. He lands hard on his feet, shooting pain up his shins, but he doesn’t care. He’s broken his arm, he’s been flung around inside a sewer by a demon clown — this is nothing.

Getting his bike out of the garage is a no-go, because his mom would definitely hear, so Eddie heads for Richie’s house on foot. Luckily, it’s only a couple blocks away, and the long summer days mean the sun hasn’t yet started to set when he gets to Richie’s door. He remembers Richie saying at the library that his parents were going to be out late that night, and the car isn’t in the driveway when Eddie gets there, so he just knocks on the front door instead of trying to throw rocks at Richie’s bedroom window the way Richie always does for him.

He hears Richie stomping down the stairs a moment before the front door flings open. He looks surprised but delighted to see Eddie standing there. “Eds! What’re you doing here?” He pauses, taking in Eddie’s panicked breathing and the lack of a bicycle on the lawn. “Are you okay?” 

Eddie shakes his head and pushes past Richie into the house, crossing his arms tightly. Richie shuts the door and turns to face him, the two of them standing in the little foyer and staring at each other. Richie’s magnified eyes behind his glasses look even huger with worry. 

“Dude, what’s going on?” Richie asks. “It’s not… it’s not _It,_ is it?”

“No!” Eddie gasps, shaking his head again frantically. “No, no, it’s — it’s this.” He pulls the inhaler out of his pocket and thrusts it at Richie. Richie frowns, taking it and turning it over in his hands.

“But you threw it away. I saw you. At Neibolt?”

“My mom got me a new one. She — she made me use it, I didn’t want to use it but I’m freaking out and I can’t, I can’t fucking breathe,” Eddie says. He crosses his arms again, feeling like if he doesn’t physically hold himself together he might literally explode. “Stan showed me these, these fucking breathing exercises that would help but I can’t do them, they don’t work!” 

Richie looks from the inhaler to Eddie and back again a couple times with his dumb bug-eyed concern that’s making Eddie’s chest even tighter. He wants — he wants Richie to _hug_ him or something. Instead, Richie says, “Hey, show me the stupid exercises. I wanna see.”

Eddie is incensed. He’s breathing so harshly and shallowly that he feels like he might pass out soon, and Richie wants to know about the fucking _breathing exercises?_ Why did Eddie think coming here would help? He’s going to black out in Richie’s house and get a concussion and then his mom is going to kill him. “Fuck off, Richie!” 

“No, c’mon, I wanna know! What, do you think I can’t do ’em or something?” Richie demands. He pokes Eddie in the arm and Eddie has to de-pretzel his limbs so he can smack Richie’s hand away.

“You’re such a dick,” Eddie says. “God, it’s not even hard! You just —” He puts his hands on his stomach. “Breathe in like this and then let it out.” He does it a few times, exaggerated, in through the nose and out through the mouth while glaring at Richie the whole time. Richie just looks at him with a slight smile on his face. Eddie tosses his hands up in the air. “There! See?” Richie raises his eyebrows, and Eddie realizes that his chest no longer feels like it’s being crushed, and his breath is coming in and out normally. He blinks a few times. “Oh,” he says.

“They don’t work, huh?” Richie says. He looks proud of himself. 

In that moment, Eddie remembers that Richie is _smart._ He might not have the same sort of old-soul wisdom that Stan has, but Richie — he knows _Eddie,_ better than probably anyone else does or ever has. He knew how to make the exercises actually work. Eddie’s flooded with such a surge of overwhelming gratitude that he wants again to hug Richie, or maybe just cry. He does neither of those things. He reaches out and punches Richie lightly on the arm. “You’re so friggin’ annoying,” he says.

“Yeah, yeah,” Richie says. “You’re welcome, you ungrateful butthole.”

Eddie notices that Richie is still holding the inhaler. “Um, I guess I can take that now.”

Richie doesn’t hand it back yet. “Or we could burn it in my backyard.”

“No way! That thing’s made of plastic and like, I don’t know, chemicals and shit! What if it explodes?” 

“It might _explode?_ Is that supposed to make me _not_ wanna set it on fire?”

“We’re not setting it on fire, Richie!” Eddie yelps, darting forward to swipe the inhaler out of Richie’s hand. He stomps through the entryway into the kitchen, Richie trailing behind him, and slams the inhaler into the trash can. 

Richie whistles, impressed.

Eddie turns around to look at him, his face a little red, but he can’t help but smile. “I don’t need it,” he says.

“No way,” Richie agrees. “Your mom’s a nutjob, Eds.” His arms swing aimlessly at his sides, like he doesn’t know what to do with them. 

“Yeah, I guess so,” Eddie says. He doesn’t know what else to say; he’s still coming to terms with this new reality, where his mother is someone he cannot trust on a fundamental level. Thankfully, his stomach gives a well-timed gurgle to change the subject. “Hey, do you have snacks or something? I didn’t really eat much dinner because of… you know.”

Richie’s brow furrows with a vaguely concerned expression that Eddie doesn’t have time to decipher before it changes to his usual goofy, over-the-top grin. “Why Edward, you’re gonna eat me out of house and home!” he says. “But fear not, I can provide only the very best _cuisine-o Italiano.”_

“I don’t think that’s a word,” Eddie says, snickering. 

Richie microwaves them a plate of pizza rolls that they eat while sitting on the living room floor, their knees touching and neither of them saying anything about it. The next day, Eddie goes back to Neibolt and gets his fanny pack and his medication — not because he thinks he needs it, but because he doesn't want to deal with another dinner like the one the night before. His mother is smugly pleased when he brings it back to the house, and he tells himself to breathe, just breathe.

* * *

**2016**

Eddie waits until he’s closed the door of his hotel room behind him and dropped his bags at the foot of the bed before he lets himself start to have a panic attack. He’s been coasting on a sort of out-of-body feeling since he walked out of his house with Myra telling him if he left she wouldn’t let him come back, like that was meant to scare him — and he thinks, as his hands start shaking, that maybe it did, a little bit. It cements the reality of his choice, that he’s not going back. 

He felt, as he backed out of the driveway, that same feeling that had rushed over him when he left his mother’s house for the third and final time: like something had been crushing his lungs for so long that he didn’t even realize it until the vise was removed and he could take in a proper lungful of air. It felt good, until now, when he starts to think about the fact that he’s just overturned his entire life and his only possessions are in two suitcases at the foot of his bed at the Holiday Inn. 

Eddie presses his trembling hands to his knees and watches his knuckles turn white. He thinks about his childhood, about all the times he’d just puff on his inhaler like it was actually doing anything. No one had showed him how to use the fucking thing correctly. He learned recently that the medicine in his inhaler was likely giving him an adrenaline surge and actually making the anxiety worse. No wonder he was so tightly wound as a kid; it’s a miracle his head didn’t pop off. 

The memory of his inhaler, and the medicinal acid-taste of it in his mouth, stirs another memory — thirteen-year-old Stan Uris, with his serious eyes and his tucked-in shirt, telling Eddie how to breathe through the panic. He clutches at the memory like a security blanket, but in his haze he can’t actually remember anything Stan said twenty-seven years ago.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket and shakily taps out a text to Stan.

> **_Eddie_ ** **_  
> _ ** _Hi Stan do you have a minute_
> 
> **_Stanley_ ** **_  
> _ ** _Of course!_ _  
> _ _Should I call you?_

Eddie winces. He responds: _No thanks don’t think I can talk right now. Do you remember those breathing exercises you showed me in middle school?,_ which is far too revealing, but it’s not like Stan doesn’t know how Eddie’s anxiety can get. Eddie just hopes he won’t ask what’s wrong. 

Luckily, because Stan is Stan, he doesn’t ask. The typing bubble shows up for a few seconds, followed by a link to a website that walks you through several different breathing techniques for anxiety and panic attacks. Eddie sends Stan a thumbs up emoji and then sits on the bed in his hotel room and breathes. 

It takes longer than he’d like, but he closes his eyes and focuses. In through the nose, out through the mouth. He’s got good lungs, a good diaphragm that’s moving how it needs to move, and he rests his hands on his stomach to feel it expand with air. There was a time when he wouldn’t have been able to work through this on his own, but he can do it now. He just needed a reminder to get him started.

When he’s got his breath back under control, he feels a little better and a lot embarrassed. He should probably text Stan back with a thank you, or a fucking explanation, but he thinks he’d die of humiliation first. He’s still not completely relaxed, and the hotel room is quiet and unfamiliar and unsettling, so he finds himself moving on autopilot to pull up the “Favorites” section in his phone app and clicking Richie’s contact photo, right at the top of the list.

Richie answers after just two rings, like usual — he always seems to have time for Eddie, no matter when he calls or texts. It’s been the easiest habit to fall into in the couple months since Derry — that Richie will be around. It’s strange how easy it is, after so many years apart, but right now Eddie’s just grateful for Richie’s reliability. 

“Hey Eds! What’s shakin’?” Richie says when he picks up.

Eddie flops onto his back on the bed and squeezes his eyes shut. “Can you tell me something humiliating that happened to you so I can feel better about myself?”

Richie barks out a too-loud, obnoxious laugh — Eddie’s second favorite, preceded only by the times where Richie laughs so hard he snorts. He thinks maybe it’s not normal to rank your friend’s different laughs. “But there’s just so many stories to choose from,” Richie says. “Ooh, wait, I know — yesterday I tripped on my shoelaces and ate shit in front of everyone in a Starbucks.”

“Oh my god! Are you okay?”

“No, I broke all my bones and I’m in the hospital, actually,” Richie deadpans. “I’m fine, dude, only thing that woulda gotten hurt was my dignity if I had any left.” 

Eddie huffs out a quiet chuckle. “Okay.”

“Not that I don’t love eviscerating myself for your amusement,” Richie says, “but is there a reason we’re playing Trash the Trashmouth today?”

Eddie sighs. Fair is fair, he supposes, and throws any hope of his own dignity out the window. “Well I just had to have Stan text me through a panic attack, so it was either this or pitch my phone into the Hudson.”

Richie’s voice drops all hints of teasing. “Are you okay?” he asks. He sounds so quietly sincere, like how he had at the Jade of the Orient when he’d said _“I’m relieved to be here with you guys.”_ Now, just like then, it makes Eddie’s heart squeeze in an undefinable way. 

“Yeah, I’m — I’m fine now. Talking to Stan helped a little. This is helping.” 

“Why’d you call Stan first, anyway?” Richie asks, and Eddie tries not to read too much into the note of jealousy in his voice. 

“He’s the one who taught me those, like, breathing exercises forever ago. I remembered that and it just felt like the only thing I could think of in the moment,” Eddie says. 

“Okay, well, if you ever need someone to walk you through that shit again, you can call me,” Richie says. “I know those breathing exercises, too.”

“You do?” 

Richie scoffs. “Yeah, dude, you taught them to me, remember?”

“Like three decades ago! I didn’t think you’d still remember.”

“Oh yeah, I never forgot ’em,” Richie says in an overly casual voice that means what he’s saying is much more important to him than he’s letting on. “I use them sometimes, actually, like before I go on stage? I could never remember where I learned them, but they help.”

“Oh,” Eddie says quietly. His insides feel too big in his chest, and he has to close his eyes again. Talking to Richie makes his fucking stomach hurt sometimes.

“Anyway, my point is, you can talk to me,” Richie continues. “I mean I’m happy to be your fuckin’ personal court jester or whatever, but believe it or not, I am capable of talking about the serious shit too.”

“Okay, okay,” Eddie says. “I got it.”

“Well, good. No offense to Stanley or anything, I’m sure he’s a great therapist.” Richie sounds borderline petulant now, which is just annoying enough that Eddie loses the last thread of hesitation holding him back from telling the truth.

“I left my wife, okay?” he says. 

Richie says, “What? When?”

“I don’t know, like, an hour ago?” Eddie says, and Richie sputters like he’s doing foley work for a speedboat engine. Eddie sighs. “Are you done?”

“Sorry,” Richie says, still sounding blindsided. “Sorry, I just — I never thought —”

“What, never thought I’d get the fucking balls to do it?” Eddie says, sharper than he means to.

After a beat of silence, Richie says in that same startlingly sincere voice, “No, come on, I didn’t mean it like that.”

Eddie swallows hard. He sits up again on the bed. “I didn’t even tell Stan that’s why I was panicking. I haven’t told anyone else yet.” _I wanted to tell you first,_ he doesn’t say, because he knows it’s true but isn’t sure why. “We were fighting — me and Myra — I don’t even know what about. We fight all the fucking time, it’s only gotten worse since I got home. And she goes, ‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to do to me,’ and I just said, ‘I’m trying to leave you!’ And I didn’t even know I was gonna say that until I did, but then I was like, shit, yeah. I am doing that. So she told me if I left she wasn’t letting me come back this time —”

“This time?” Richie interrupts.

“Uh, yeah. I’ve left before. Before the Derry time, I mean.” Eddie winces even as he says it. “A couple years ago. I stayed in a hotel for the night and then I came back and she let me. I don’t know fucking why, we’re horrible for each other, it’s never been — it’s never been good. I think we were both just too scared to change anything.” 

“But now you did,” Richie says. 

“You know I tried to leave my mom’s house three fucking times before I really did it?” Eddie says. “I kept going back. I don’t know why I did that, either.” He laughs ruefully. “Fuck, remember when I threw my inhaler away at your house? I used to be so much braver. What the fuck happened to me?”

“Clown magic happened, dude, we all regressed,” Richie says. “Don’t be so fuckin’ hard on yourself, Eds. Want me to trash myself to make you feel better some more? I can remind you about how I was making sexist jokes from six leagues deep in the closet for my entire career if you want.”

“No, stop, I don’t want you to — that’s different.” Eddie clenches his fist in the bedsheets. It’s overwhelming sometimes, how much he seeks Richie out for comfort. He feels like an asshole now for opening this whole conversation asking Richie to talk shit about himself. He doesn’t want that, not really — he wants, with the same urgency he’d felt in childhood, for Richie to hug him. That’s all he really wants. But he can’t ask for that, for so many reasons. Richie isn’t even here. 

“Hey, just trying to help,” Richie says.

“You are helping,” Eddie says. Then, perhaps too honestly, he adds, “You always help.”

“At the risk of you calling me an asshole, I’m proud of you, man,” Richie says earnestly. “I mean it. If you can do this, you can do anything you want.”

Eddie thinks about how final it had felt to drive away from his house, where he’d never felt anything but trapped. He thinks about his breath and the body he felt was so out of his control for so much of his life, and how he was able to bring himself back down today, all on his own. His chest expands and the oxygen pulls into his bloodstream, and it’s like he can feel it all happening with every breath.

When Eddie was thirteen, he couldn’t quite define the almost sharp ache that hit him in the chest when Richie was nice to him, or anytime Richie was around, or really whenever he thought too hard about Richie at all. The sharp feeling is back, and it should constrict his lungs but it loosens them instead, filling them up full as he aches for _something._ He just — he wants Richie to be there.

Maybe he should be more surprised by his impulsivity, but when he finds himself buying a plane ticket to Los Angeles three weeks later, Eddie’s not surprised at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Eddie tries to prove a point.
> 
> find me on twitter @hermanngottiieb


	2. Proving a point

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warnings for this chapter: this chapter centers around needle phobia, so there is extensive discussion of the phobia and needles in general; internalized homophobia; blood (not a lot) and mentions of an infected piercing; richie experiences a microaggression

**1990**

In the spring of 1990, the Uris family moves away, Eddie spends a springtime for once not worrying about the consequences of rolling around in freshly cut grass, and Bill announces that he wants to pierce his ear. Richie is, of course, the only one who could be convinced to jam a needle through Bill’s earlobe, so one sunny day in April finds Eddie, Richie, Bill, Mike, and Ben sitting in the clubhouse while Richie uses his lighter to sterilize an earring he stole from his mother, and Bill holds an ice cube to his left ear. 

“I think this is probably a bad idea,” Ben says from his spot in the hammock. 

“It’s definitely a bad idea,” Mike says, watching the whole thing unfold with mild fascination from the opposite side of the clubhouse, leaning against the wall.

“You’re all a buncha pussies,” Richie says. Then he hisses and nearly drops the earring when he accidentally runs the tip of his finger through the flame. Richie tucks the earring into the pocket of his shirt, completely defeating the purpose of sterilizing it, and then starts on the sewing needle. 

“Once it heals, you should get a hoop,” Ben tells Bill, who has water dripping from the ice cube all over his hand and shirt. “Like a pirate.”

“Oh, yeah. Pirates are cool,” Mike agrees. 

Eddie stands with his arms folded tightly across his chest, watching as Richie moves the needle in and out of the flickering lighter flame. He’s always had a problem with needles. He still cries every time he gets a shot at the doctor, something he’ll never admit to  _ anyone  _ and definitely not to Richie.

It’s not the pain that frightens him, because he knows now that he can handle a greater degree of pain than his mother ever let him believe. He’s tried to push the fear out of him, tried to leave it behind in the sewers with everything else his mother made him believe, but it’s harder. It feels so tangled inside him, he doesn’t know where to begin to undo it.

The needle glints in Richie’s hand, and Eddie thinks about how he trusts Richie. Richie is safe. Richie is… something unnameable and reliable, and Eddie feels this with the unwavering certainty that one feels things when they’re young. He thinks, maybe, in Richie’s hands, the needle wouldn’t be so scary.

“Hey,” Eddie says, and Richie glances up, his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose. “After Bill’s done, do mine next.”

Richie gapes at him, tossing his head slightly to nudge his glasses back up so he can really stare at Eddie in disbelief. “You want me to  _ pierce  _ your  _ ear?”  _ he says.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, defiant. “What? Bill’s doing it, why not me?”

“Um, are you sure about that, Eddie?” Ben asks. “I thought you didn’t like —”

“I’m sure,” Eddie interrupts. “It’s fine. I’m not scared.”

Richie blinks at him a few times. “Uhhh,” he says. The flame of his lighter has gone out, and the needle is held loosely between his fingers, in danger of falling into the dirt. “I mean, if you really want me to, Eds, sure. I have an extra earring.”

“Cool.” Eddie nods, decisive. 

Bill moves the melty ice cube from his ear and sits up a little straighter when Richie approaches him with the needle. “W-wait,” he says, frowning. “W-which ear is the g-g-gay ear?”

Richie stares at him with alarm before a mask of blank indifference falls over his face. Eddie thinks he might be the only one who even noticed. “The fucking what,” he says.

“The g-gay ear! I don’t remember which one it is, d-don’t pierce the gay one.” Bill’s left earlobe is bright red from the ice. Eddie feels the tips of his own ears growing hot with a sudden, inexplicable flush of embarrassment at Bill’s words, and he glances over at Mike and Ben — Ben is pretending to ignore what’s happening in their corner of the clubhouse, and Mike’s expression is coolly unreadable. 

Richie sits down next to Bill and rolls his eyes. “I’m not gonna pierce your fuckin’ gay ear, Bill, calm the fuck down.” He holds the needle up. “You ready?”

Mike leans in slightly, and Ben shifts in the hammock so he can sort of see. Eddie starts to take a step back before he grits his teeth and stays put. He can handle this. It’s fine. He’s not afraid of anything anymore. 

Richie’s hand moves in a downward arc, and the needle stabs through the soft, squishy flesh of Bill’s earlobe. Bill shrieks, Richie shrieks, Eddie sees blood, and his whole body gets so woozy it’s like a headrush. He knows with a sudden, shocking clarity that if he doesn’t leave the clubhouse right that very moment he’s going to either faint or puke, so he pushes past Mike and throws himself up the ladder and back out into the Barrens. 

He hunches over immediately and gags, dry heaving once, before the panic feeling subsides and he can stand up straight again. It’s a bright, clear day, and the sky is blue and uninterrupted by clouds where it’s visible through the leaves overhead. Eddie sits down on the dirt just beside the trapdoor, willing the heat of shame and momentary terror to leave his cheeks. Below, he can hear his friends yelling over each other, their words indistinguishable. Eddie feels cowardly and small, sitting with the trees towering above him.

He’s not afraid of the pain, and he’s not even really afraid of the blood. No, it’s the memory of endless doctor’s visits, the sterile chill of the room, sitting in the flimsy gown on the table, while his mother stood in the corner and threw question after question at the doctor and Eddie shivered and a nurse drew blood from his skinny, goosebumped arm. And it’s the act of piercing, of stabbing — the reminder of Its teeth. And twisted up in all of it, it’s the fear of infection, it’s the fear of something dirty being injected into his veins. A poisonous fear that he knows is all his mother’s doing; what exactly she meant when she instilled the fear in him, he’s starting to understand more and more.

A few minutes pass and the chatter in the clubhouse quiets a bit, and then Eddie hears the sound of someone climbing the ladder. Richie’s head pokes out of the opening in the ground, and he hoists himself out of the trapdoor and drops down next to Eddie, eyeing him warily. 

Eddie can’t look him in the eye. “Is Bill okay?” he asks, staring straight ahead.

“Yeah, he’s fine,” Richie says. “It’s mostly not bleeding anymore. I should get a job at one of those kiosks at the mall!” 

Eddie knows Richie’s trying to make him laugh, but he can barely muster up a smile. “You’d be a fucking nightmare with a piercing gun,” he manages. He still feels so fucking small. 

Richie nudges him with his shoulder, and Eddie glances his way at last. “Eds,” Richie says, too gently, and Eddie’s insides shrivel up. “It’s okay if you don’t —”

“This is so fucking  _ stupid,”  _ Eddie snarls, banging his fist against the dirt. “I’m supposed to be fucking — brave now, or whatever, and I’m still scared of needles? Why?! Last summer I kicked a clown in the face!”

“Hey, come on,” Richie says, frowning. “This doesn’t change anything, Eddie, you’re still brave.” 

“Then why did I almost pass the fuck out just now?” Eddie demands. “I hate this, I hate being afraid, I don’t want to be afraid of anything ever again. I just want to  _ do  _ stuff.” His fingertips bite into the hardened ground under his palms, and he lets the grit get under his nails. He doesn’t care about getting dirty, he finds reasons to make it happen. He’s so different from the boy he was even just a few months ago. He wants to be more than brave — he wants to be impulsive, reckless. He wants to prove to himself, to  _ Richie,  _ that nothing scares him. Instead he’s here, still wigging out at the sight of a needle. 

“Everybody’s scared of stuff,” Richie says slowly. “Even the bravest person in the world’s scared of  _ something.  _ And you know what? I’m glad you don’t want to do it. I don’t think I coulda done it to you anyway. I don’t — I don’t wanna hurt you, Eds.”

Eddie frowns at him. “But you did it to Bill.”

“That’s different.”

“I’m not fucking  _ delicate,  _ Richie,” Eddie snaps. The tips of his fingers hurt where they’re pressed into the ground. He thinks of the bone in his arm, the way it had snapped like a twig but then mended itself again. There was nothing delicate about the gruesome break or the way his bone knitted back together.

“I know you’re not!” Richie exclaims. He picks at a loose thread in the knee of his jeans. “I just didn’t want to do it to you. Maybe that’s something I’m scared of, okay?” His voice drops to a mumble by the end of the sentence, and he’s staring determinedly at his knees. 

Over the past several months, since June of 1989, Eddie has realized more truths about the world than in most of the rest of his life combined. He realizes now, staring at Richie, another truth: Richie Tozier loves him. Eddie doesn’t know quite what that means — except he thinks of why his mother wants him to be afraid of needles, he thinks of Bill asking which ear is the gay ear, and maybe he does know what it means after all. 

Eddie closes his eyes and leans over, pointed and deliberate, so their shoulders touch. 

(Bill’s piercing gets infected almost immediately, and Mrs. Denbrough is furious, but Bill is a loyal friend and won’t ’fess up to who pierced it for him. The earring has to be taken out and his earlobe is red and swollen-looking for a while, but they all end up agreeing that Bill probably couldn’t rock the pirate look, anyway.) 

* * *

**2016**

The thing about airplanes — and Eddie knows a  _ lot  _ of things about airplanes — is that they give him far too much time to think. He knows all the statistics, he  _ knows  _ you’re more likely to get in an accident driving on the highway than you are to die in a plane crash, fuck,  _ he’s  _ gotten into car accidents and he’s never died in a plane crash. But he also thinks about germs, and crowded, small spaces, and turbulence. His mind tumbles over every worst case scenario, because that’s what he’s wired to do: find the most horrible thing that could happen, quantify it, calculate it, reduce it to numbers.  _ Make it small,  _ he thinks wryly. 

He sits in the aisle seat, which is always his preference because he knows himself and  _ will  _ have to piss at least three times during the time it takes to fly from JFK to LAX. Before takeoff he puts in his pressure-reducing earplugs and sticks a mint in his mouth to help with the anxiety nausea, and he closes his eyes and white-knuckles the armrests through their ascent. 

It’s easier to distract himself these days than it used to be. That’s the one upside to getting your entire childhood dumped unceremoniously back into your brain after twenty-seven years of it being mostly a hazy blur that you inexplicably never thought too hard about. There’s just  _ so  _ much to unpack, literally all the time. It’s been nearly four months since Derry, and he’s still finding new things to comb through, the foundations of all his lifelong neuroses and fears.

As the plane starts to even out, Eddie opens his eyes and settles in for the flight. He thinks about the slight cramp in his knee, and the ache in his back teeth from clenching them. He glances to the side at the person next to him — a younger man, already listening to music and tuning out the flight entirely. He has a row of three tiny hoops in one ear. The sight of the silver earrings jostles another memory loose. The clubhouse, a needle in Richie’s hand, blood on Bill’s ear. 

His fear of needles.  _ Quantify it. Make it small.  _ Like if he can just pick apart his trauma and get to the heart of it, he can crush it like they crushed the clown’s oily black heart and be rid of it forever. And maybe it works with some things, but this feels harder to get to the root of, because he doesn’t know what the root  _ is.  _ It’s so tangled up in fucking  _ everything,  _ it feels almost fundamental. 

_ Okay, Eds, one thing at a goddamn time,  _ he thinks to himself. He looks down at his hands, at the veins tracing paths from his knuckles down to his wrists. It’s the doctor, and the clown, and the leper that wasn’t really a leper at all — it’s all of those things. But he makes his own doctor’s appointments now and he gets his flu shot every year without flinching, and the clown is dead, and — and Eddie isn’t afraid of AIDS anymore. Or, he is, in the way that he’s afraid of most diseases and illnesses, but he doesn’t think he’s going to get it from touching a dirty subway pole. He also knows what his mother really wanted him to be afraid of, and he’s not afraid of that, either. 

Eddie has, in the past almost-four months, worked up to saying, out loud to himself when he’s alone, “I think I might be gay.” It’s certainly more than he was ever able to say as a kid, back when he first knew and was terrified of knowing. That must mean something, right? Proof that he's successfully cast out the shame and dread he’d been taught?

_ Then why can’t you get rid of the “I think” part of that statement, huh? And why does the thought of getting one of those big shiny piercing needles in your ear still make you feel like you’re about to keel over? What the fuck’s the  _ matter  _ with you?  _

He knows — he  _ knows  _ — that fear doesn’t work that way. Just because he doesn’t think being gay means he’s sick anymore, doesn’t mean he’s suddenly fine with the idea of someone stabbing him in the ear, even if for some fucking reason those two things feel connected. He rubs unconsciously at the pink line of scar tissue across his cheek, right along the spot where it runs through his dimple. He’s had enough stabbing in his face for a lifetime. 

When his plane lands in Los Angeles six hours later, Eddie is still thinking about it. It’s why, when he gets in an Uber to leave the airport, he selects a random piercing and tattoo parlor as his destination.

That, and he doesn’t have Richie’s fucking address.

It’s December, but it’s still a balmy sixty degrees because it’s LA, and Eddie’s sweating his ass off in the winter coat he wore from New York. As soon as he gets out of the car he takes it off, hanging it over his arm as he drags his rolling suitcase up onto the sidewalk outside the shop and stares up at the sign. He can see the front counter through the window, the glass display case of piercing jewelry and the framed flash sheets from the artists on the walls. 

Someone brushes past him to go inside the shop, and when the door opens Eddie can hear music and the mechanical whir of the tattoo gun, and he immediately feels lightheaded. Woozily, Eddie pulls his belongings behind him and sits down on a bench outside the shop. He counts to fifty. He takes out his phone and calls Richie.

“Hey, I’m in LA, can you pick me up? I don’t know where your house is.”

“You’re here? What the fuck, man, of course I’ll pick you up. Are you at the airport?”

Eddie huffs out a breath. “No, I — I’ll text you the address. I’m just outside some shop.”

“Oookay, Mr. Mystery Man. See you soon, I guess?” 

Eddie hangs up and texts Richie the address, and then sits there and waits, the tattoo gun sound still buzzing in his ears. Twenty minutes later, a red convertible pulls up outside the shop, and Richie hops out. 

“Eds!” he says, grinning. “What’re you doing here, man?” He looks up at the building, taking in the “Tattoos + Piercings” in big letters on the window, and his eyes bug out. “No, wait, what are you doing  _ here? _ Did you get a  _ piercing?”  _

“No!” Eddie says quickly, standing up. Richie’s making a very weird face. His eyes are fucking enormous, round as saucers. He looks almost pained. 

“Did you get  _ ink?!”  _ he demands, peering at Eddie like he’s trying to see through his clothes and find a secret tattoo there.

“Of course not, I have a needle phobia, jackass.”

“Well  _ excuse  _ me for making assumptions when you’re sitting outside a tattoo parlor,” Richie says, tossing his hands in the air. “Is this your divorce midlife crisis move? You’re gonna get a sleeve and become a bad boy?” 

“No, you dickwad,” Eddie says, pinching the bridge of his nose. 

“Then what’re you doing here, Eds? Hell, what are you doing in LA?” 

“I think I am having a midlife crisis,” Eddie admits. “And I figured you’d be the best person to talk to about that.”

“What, really? Why?”

“You seem like the kind of person who’s had several midlife crises already,” Eddie says. 

Richie wheezes. “Okay, fucking rude, but true,” he says.

They stare at each other for a moment. Eddie hasn’t seen Richie in person since Derry. This fact seems to settle over both of them at once, and the tension bleeds out of Eddie’s shoulders as Richie steps forward to give Eddie a quick, firm hug. 

“Hi, Rich,” Eddie says, smiling sheepishly when they pull back. “Sorry for showing up unannounced.”

“Dude, you can show up here whenever the fuck you want,” Richie says, shaking his head. “Don’t even worry about it.”

“I was thinking about that time you pierced Bill’s ear,” Eddie tells him. “That’s why I came here — to the shop, I mean. Remember that? And you didn’t want to pierce mine.”

Something passes over Richie’s face, and his eyes flick down and away. He smiles, just a little, like he’s embarrassed. “Yeah, I remember. You would’ve kicked me in the face if I tried to come at you with a needle, Eds, we both know it.”

“Maybe. But maybe not. I trusted you,” Eddie says. Richie makes a very soft noise and then clears his throat loudly. As he does, Eddie remembers another childhood revelation:  _ Richie loves me,  _ he’d known back then. Does Richie love him now? Eddie looks at him, trying to discern something in his face or his posture, like it’ll be written plainly on his skin. Richie hunches his shoulders, wary under Eddie’s gaze, and grabs Eddie’s suitcase so he can drag it back over to the car. 

Richie keeps the top down as they drive, talking all the while and eagerly bouncing from one topic to another, sometimes mid-sentence. Eddie smiles to himself, turning his face toward the street so Richie won’t see. He hovers a flat hand carefully just outside the confines of the car — not enough to be a hazard, just enough to feel the air rushing under his palm. He’s never been to Los Angeles before. So far, it’s all very warm.

They meet up with Bill for dinner. Richie brings up the piercing incident, and Bill cracks up. “Oh man, that fucked up my ear for life,” he says. He reaches up to tug slightly at his earlobe. “I’ve still got a scar and everything. I’m glad I finally remember where the hell that came from.”

“I saw some kid on the airplane with his ear pierced,” Eddie says. “It was the other ear, though.” 

Richie’s face twitches into a sharp sort of smile. “The gay ear, right, Bill?” he says. Something twinges in Eddie’s chest, that Richie remembers that detail too. 

To his credit, Bill winces, looking decently remorseful. “I was a dumbass kid,” he says. “Not that the word ‘bisexual’ was even on my radar back then, but I think I had some internalized homophobia issues.”

Eddie’s eyebrows raise in surprise, but this doesn’t seem to be new information to Richie, who just hums and raises his glass in mock toast. “I hear that,” he says.

“How did you, like, get over that?” Eddie asks, stabbing at his food mindlessly and not looking at either of them.

Richie snorts. “Buddy, if I figure out how to do that, I’ll let ya know.” 

After dinner, Eddie and Richie drive back to Richie’s house, the convertible’s top still down and the sky dark and starless with pollution. Richie drums his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat of a song playing over the radio that Eddie doesn’t recognize.

“I think,” Eddie says slowly, “that maybe I’ll be afraid of needles forever. At least a little bit.”

Richie hums. “That’s not so bad. Everyone’s afraid of shit. You just… live with it.” 

“I guess so,” Eddie says. “I’m sick of feeling like being afraid is holding me back from doing everything I want to do, though.”

“Do you  _ want _ to get a tattoo or something, dude?” 

“No,” Eddie says, laughing a little. He tips his head back against the seat. “No, that’s not what I mean.”

“I, uh, don’t know if this will make sense with your situation,” Richie says, “but I think there’s a difference between, you know, living with the fear and letting the fear have power over you. Like, am I always going to have some kind of a knee-jerk panic response to people knowing I’m gay? I don’t know, maybe. And I have to live with that. I’m just not letting it control my whole fucking life anymore.” 

They come to a stoplight, and Richie’s voice trails off. Eddie turns his head and catches Richie looking at him, and right then it  _ is  _ written plainly on his face — for the second time, Eddie knows Richie Tozier loves him. The knowledge settles in his core, all tangled up like his fears and his memories and everything else that makes up Eddie Kaspbrak. Is this a fundamental part of Eddie, too, that he is loved by Richie? 

He doesn’t know how to quantify it, how to parse it down to numbers. Maybe some things can’t be dissected like that. Some things just  _ are,  _ and Eddie doesn’t get to know the answers for sure. Maybe he just has to suck it up and live with that. 

Eddie only stays with Richie for the weekend, but he feels better for it, more grounded. Being with his friends has always helped with that. When his plane lands in New York and he takes his phone off airplane mode, he has a text from Richie with a link to a registration page for a half-marathon in LA four months from now. Eddie smiles. In the taxi back to his apartment, he signs himself up. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Let him run.
> 
> find me on twitter @hermanngottiieb


	3. Let him run

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no warnings for this chapter, but a fun fact: eddie's high school gym coach is named after his elementary school gym teacher in the book. also, eddie's race number in the 2017 section of the chapter is the last page of the clown book in the edition i own.

**1991**

Three weeks into Eddie’s sophomore year of high school, he hangs back after gym class until most of the other kids have left, and then he approaches Coach Black, who is standing by the locker rooms to make sure no one’s straggling behind.

“Kaspbrak,” the coach says, nodding to him. “Run along now, or you’ll be late for third period.”

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about something?” Eddie says. He takes a breath, focusing deliberately on making it slow and even. “I’d like to sign up for track and field this year.” 

Coach Black raises his eyebrows. “Now, Eddie —” he begins carefully.

“I know the school has my most recent physical on file from the beginning of the year,” Eddie interjects, raising his voice a little. “It says there’s nothing wrong with me! I mean — um, it says that I’m healthy. I can run.” He lifts his chin, defiant. 

“That’s true,” Coach Black says. “I’ve seen you run. You’re quite fast.” He folds his arms and eyes Eddie thoughtfully. “There’s a fee for your team jersey. And you’ll need signed parental permission if you want to compete.” 

Eddie shrugs his backpack off one shoulder and pulls out the crumpled wad of money — pooled allowances from Bill, Richie, Ben, and Mike. Eddie’s mother doesn’t give him an allowance. He also pulls out a permission slip he’d gotten from the front office, one with his mother’s signature carefully forged by Ben, who’s the best at faking other people’s handwriting. 

“Are you sure you won’t get in trouble for this?” Ben asked when Eddie brought him the permission slip a couple days earlier.

Eddie shook his head. “You’re really good, I don’t think they’ll be able to tell. And I won’t rat you out if they figure it out.”

Ben smiled, ducking his head. “Yeah, I know, Eddie. I meant are you gonna get in trouble with your mom?” 

Eddie’s lips thinned, and he shook his head again. “She’s not going to find out,” he said. 

Now, Coach Black takes the permission slip and the money from Eddie and looks it over. Then he looks over the top of the paper and into Eddie’s defiant face. Coach Black — and really, every physical education teacher Eddie’s ever had — knows Sonia Kaspbrak. She’s tried to get Eddie out of doing phys ed every year since the first grade. She’d get Eddie’s doctor to write notes saying he should be excused, because Sonia Kaspbrak had Eddie’s pediatrician wrapped around her finger, and she told  _ him  _ Eddie’s diagnoses instead of the other way around. 

Just last year, Sonia was in the principal’s office, yelling loud enough for anyone passing by in the hall to hear, about how  _ her son  _ was not to be playing such  _ rough games  _ as  _ dodgeball,  _ not in his delicate condition. And it’s not even that Eddie particularly enjoyed dodgeball, since he’s one of the smallest boys in his class and even with the Bowers Gang disbanded after their leader got locked up for life, there are still plenty of kids who want to target the scrawniest kid on the gymnasium floor — but the fact that he  _ could  _ play rough, that he could get ahold of the dodgeball himself and pelt it with all his might, it was nothing short of thrilling. He thinks his mother knows this, and she wants to take it away from him. 

All this to say, Ben’s forged signature might be a perfect replica, but Coach Black is no fool, and it doesn’t take a genius to know that Sonia Kaspbrak would lay down and die before she willingly agreed to let Eddie join a sports team. He continues to look at Eddie, and Eddie continues to stare right back, his jaw set, his eyes blazing. 

The coach folds the permission slip in half and tucks it into his pocket. “Guess you’re all set then, Kaspbrak,” he says. “First practice is on Monday, I’ll have your jersey for you then.”

Eddie’s face splits into a wide grin, unable to contain himself. “Great! Thank you! I’ll be there!”

“Practice starts at 7 a.m., sharp,” the coach says. “That gonna be a problem for you?”

“Nuh-uh,” Eddie shakes his head. “I’ll be there.”

“Good. Now get to class.” He shoos Eddie with both hands, and Eddie, still beaming, turns to leave. Then the coach says, “Oh, and Eddie?” Eddie turns back to look at him. “If your mother…  _ changes her mind  _ about this. You know there’s not much I can do about that, right?”

Eddie’s smile slips. “I know,” he says soberly. Maybe, if he lived somewhere other than Derry, Coach Black would have stood up for him if his mother did find out — or perhaps if he lived somewhere other than Derry, his mother wouldn’t be this way at all. But this is the way things are, and Eddie knows that he can’t count on any adults to stick up for him or care for him in the way they’re supposed to. He just has to do it himself.

When he leaves the gym, Richie, Bill, and Ben are standing right outside the doors, pressed together and trying to eavesdrop. They all look at Eddie expectantly. Eddie smiles again and gives them a double thumbs up. They all burst into obnoxious, hollering cheers, and Eddie laughs, ducking his head as his friends clamber to sling their arms around him.

“I can’t believe he bought it!” Richie says, keeping his arm over Eddie’s shoulders even after Bill and Ben have let go, and the four of them start to walk down the hallway to their next class. 

Eddie shushes him, elbowing him in the side. “Shut up, he could hear you! You want to blow my cover? Jeez.” 

“I can’t believe  _ Eddie  _ lied to a teacher,” Bill says.

“Our little rebel,” Richie says fondly. “Emphasis on the  _ little  _ —”

“I hate you,” Eddie says, shoving Richie away. All of his friends hit their growth spurts over the summer, and they tower over him now. “Will you guys come watch if I get to compete?”

“Of course we will,” Ben says immediately.

“W-wouldn’t miss it,” Bill agrees.

“Eds, you  _ know  _ I’ll be front row,” Richie tells him. “Screaming your name from the bleachers.”

Eddie’s face flushes, and he rolls his eyes, still smiling. “Yeah, embarrassing the shit out of me, I know.” 

By the time Derry High School has their first track and field competition, Ben has moved away, and a gloomy feeling has settled over the remaining four Losers in his absence — a sense of something vital missing that just gets more tangible as their numbers dwindle. Even so, Eddie is in high spirits the day of the meet. Richie, Bill, and Mike are all in the crowd, sitting among everyone else’s families, and Eddie feels  _ good.  _ He does his stretches on the sidelines as the events lead up to the 800-meter dash, and when it comes time to line up, Eddie takes his place on the track and feels very present in his own body. He is very aware of his feet inside his sneakers, of the way his jersey sits just a tad too loose over his shoulders, the taut pull of his muscles when he crouches slightly, getting into position. Eddie breathes out one long breath, eyes lifted to look ahead, ears straining for the pop-gun sound that signals the start of the race. He’s the smallest of the boys on the track right now, and he wonders what they’re thinking — if they’re underestimating him. Eddie bites his lip to hide his smile. He’s used to people underestimating him. He can’t wait to prove them wrong. 

_ Pop!  _ The signal goes, and they’re off. Eddie’s feet pound against the track, and he feels it reverberate in his chest, in his lungs. He passes one of the other boys, and then another. He huffs a breath out through his nose. Everything narrows down to a fine point, when he runs. It’s like all the clamor and anxiety in his brain turns to white noise, and all he can think about is his body propelling him forward, toward his goal. He thinks a lot about what Beverly said, during that summer from hell: “I want to run toward something, not away.” He hears her voice in his head every time he runs, and so each time he picks something to run toward.  _ I’m running toward a finish line, I’m running toward a gold medal, I’m running toward my friends.  _

Eddie is ahead of everyone else. Imagine if his mother could see him now; if she saw him like this, saw how capable and  _ strong  _ he really is, would it change her mind? Would it change anything at all? Is that what he wants to run toward this time, somewhere in the back corner of his mind — his mother’s approval? 

He hears someone whooping and hollering in the bleachers as he rounds the curve of the track, and he recognizes the voice immediately — it’s Richie, because of  _ course _ it’s Richie, and all thoughts of proving himself to his mother disappear from his mind. Eddie thinks  _ I’m running toward my friends. I’m running toward Richie.  _ And he does. 

Eddie gets first place — he beats the boy in second place by a fifth of a second. And when it’s all over, and he has a gold medal hanging around his neck, Eddie runs off the field to where his friends are waiting for him, yelling their heads off and cheering like maniacs. Eddie is grinning and flooded with adrenaline and lets the three of them tug him into a group hug right there on the grass. 

He lifts his head, in the center of the circle, and feels that same sense of self-awareness, that same clarity. He has never been so sure of himself in his whole fifteen years of life. And maybe because of that, when he lifts his head and meets Richie’s gaze, full of pride and adoration, everything clicks into place all at once. The sharp feeling in his chest, the ache that’s always there when he thinks about Richie — it’s love. Of course it is. Eddie loves him. He’s felt it so long he couldn’t recognize it before, but now that he’s realized, it’s painfully obvious. Eddie smiles at Richie with love beaming right out of him, and he wonders if Richie can tell the same way Eddie can tell with him. If he knows, Richie sure doesn’t say anything now. He just presses his knuckles into Eddie’s sweaty hair and gives him a noogie, and Eddie yelps, and Mike and Bill crack up. Eddie’s gold medal is a warm, confident weight over his heart.

* * *

**2017**

Eddie bounces from foot to foot in the corral, crowded with other runners in their various gear with their numbers pinned to their chests. Eddie lifts his left leg and bends it behind him, grabbing onto his ankle and pulling it for a light stretch. Deep breaths. It’s just — thirteen miles. He drops his foot back to the ground and stretches his right leg next. He looks down at his number: 1153. Later, he’ll be able to type that into the website for the run and see photos of himself crossing the finish line. 

He can’t seem to stay still, even after he’s stretched and loosened himself up as much as he can. He keeps bouncing. He was doing this earlier, too, when his friends dropped him off at the starting point before driving down to wait for him at the finish line. “You’re like a little jackrabbit,” Richie said, ruffling Eddie’s hair. Eddie squawked and smacked at him, still bouncing. 

“You okay?” a woman next to Eddie asks. She’s watching him hop around with an amused expression. Her hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail, and she looks fit and at ease in her runner’s gear. This ain’t her first rodeo, Eddie assumes. He feels abruptly old and out of shape, even though he’s been training for four months and he knows he has  _ some  _ degree of muscle definition at this point. 

“I’m fine,” Eddie says, nerves making him snappish. 

The woman, whose number reads 1136, is unfazed by his tone. “First time?” she asks.

Eddie glances sidelong at her. He makes a concentrated effort to stay still. “Yeah,” he admits. “I was a sprinter in high school, but — obviously, that was a long time ago.” 

She smiles, nodding. “Sprinting’s pretty different from distance running anyway,” she says. “You gotta pace yourself more. Don’t use up all your energy in one burst.”

Eddie nods. He knows all of this. He’s done his research, he’s trained for this. He’s ready. It feels like a huge thing, and maybe it is, but he knows he has to take it one mile, one step at a time. There’s probably some metaphor for healing in there that his therapist would have a field day with, but Eddie’s too amped up to think about that right now. He just wants to be moving already. 

“Got anyone cheering for you at the finish line?” asks #1136.

“Yeah,” Eddie says. He smiles slightly. “My family’s waiting for me.”

“That’s sweet,” she says. “Well hey, good luck.”

The announcer says something about the first wave of runners moving to the starting line. Eddie watches the crowd in the corral ahead of him start to move. The mass of people makes him a little anxious, but he lets himself be carried forward as everyone shifts to the starting line. None of it matters once he starts running — everything fades into the background, just like it always did when he was young. Eddie feels so fully in control of his body when he runs. He can feel all of his blood pumping through all his limbs. He can feel every breath.  _ Look at what I can do,  _ he announces with every step.  _ Look at what I’m capable of. I did this all by myself.  _

As he moves, the spring-coil tension in his limbs falls away, replaced by a buoyancy that carries him mile over mile. He slows his pace to a light jog to take a paper cup of water from one of the volunteers standing along the sidelines, and it dribbles down his chin and neck as he throws it back in one long swallow. His thighs burn, and his chest feels like a hot air balloon, lifting and filling with each breath. He doesn’t just embrace the ache, he revels in it. 

By the time he hits mile thirteen, he feels more alive than he has in months, maybe years. It feels like a reclamation of everything that’s been taken from him. As a child, he never thought much about doing something like this, if only because it felt so intangible when he was living in Derry, keeping his high school track meets a secret from his mother. Maybe it’s the lack of secrecy that makes this feel so different. There’s no one he has to hide this part of himself from, or any other part. No one is trying to stop him. He’s reaching the end of the race now, and he’s running toward his friends, his  _ family,  _ and he wants to bellow at the top of his lungs that everyone should pay attention, because Eddie Kaspbrak is motherfucking  _ alive.  _

He crosses the finish line, barely slowing down as he searches the crowd of people for his friends. He hears them before he sees them — six loud as fuck Losers, all waving and yelling his name and shoving their way toward him. He’s so sweaty he can feel it coming off of him like heat waves on asphalt, but no one cares. They all clamor around him, wrapping him up in a damp, humid group hug. The memory of his first race, that 800-meter dash back in high school, falls into his head as he’s embraced by his friends. He’s been thinking abstractly about his time on the track team in high school, these past few months of training, but this memory hits him vivid and all at once.

Bev squeezes him tight and rattles him from side to side a little, beaming up at him, and he grins right back. He’s so happy she’s here. He’s so happy all of his friends are here this time, as he takes back this part of his life for himself again. 

The hug has plastered him right up against Richie, his cheek pressed against Richie’s chest, and when he looks up he just — knows. It’s not a shock, it’s just a warm, settling feeling in his core, right in the center of him.  _ Oh,  _ Eddie thinks. He has the realization a second time over:  _ Oh, I love him.  _

Again, still, always. He knew, before now. He’s probably known for a long time. This is no grand awakening, it’s just a simple, clear truth. Eddie looks at Richie and thinks,  _ maybe it’s you I’ve been running toward all along.  _

Richie’s the one who found this race for him, who knew before Eddie did that it was exactly what he needed. Because he  _ knows  _ Eddie, because he’s always looked at Eddie and seen him exactly as he is, seen him in midst of a dozen breakdowns and at his most scattered, and loved every jagged edge of him anyway. 

“How ya feelin’, jackrabbit?” Richie asks, tapping his fist lightly against Eddie’s shoulder.

His muscles burn, and he’s still panting every breath. But Eddie feels like he could do the whole thing again — run a hundred miles just to relive the moment of crossing that finish line and seeing Richie at the end of it, looking like there’s no place he’d rather be. “Pretty fucking good,” he says. 

Later, when they’re all out for dinner and hollering over each other and passing plates back and forth to try each other’s food, Eddie goes onto the race’s website to type in his number. His participation medal still hangs around his neck, and his hair is pushed back with dried sweat. He probably stinks. No one really seems to mind.

The webpage loads, and then the photos of Eddie pull up on his phone screen. There’s one of him right as he crossed the finish line, his face this wild mixture of euphoria and determination, his forehead all creased up and his mouth open, eyes squinched shut. He looks insane. It’s immediately his favorite picture of himself ever taken. He nudges Richie, holding out his phone for him to see.

Richie leans in, and then snorts. “You crazy fuckin’ jock. What are you even doing at the Losers’ table anymore, you’re too cool for all of us.”

“What about this picture screams ‘cool’ to you?” Eddie says, laughing.

“You look feral,” Richie tells him. “Are there more?”

“Oh, yeah, I think so.” Eddie scrolls down. There are three more photos. In one of them, he’s lifting his arms above his head, revealing the dark rings of sweat under his arms, and he’s grinning wide and triumphant, his head tilted back. In the next, he’s looking away from the camera, searching the crowd. And in the last one —

In the last one, he’s spotted his friends, and he’s looking at them, at  _ Richie,  _ with such bright, earnest love, it’s almost embarrassing. Is this what he’s always looked like, when he looks at Richie? Before he even put words to the feeling? Eddie glances sidelong at Richie now, gauging his reaction, but Richie’s just smiling fondly at the picture. He doesn’t look surprised. Maybe he does already know.

“Send me those,” Richie tells him, leaning out of Eddie’s space again. “That first one especially, it could be a meme.”

“What the fuck does that mean,” Eddie says, pocketing his phone and trying to sound annoyed instead of like he’s deeply, absurdly in love. 

“I swear to god I’m gonna make you a Twitter account before you go back to New York,” Richie says, pointing his fork at him. “You  _ will  _ become social media literate, Eds, it’s just embarrassing right now. I can’t be seen with you.” 

“I can’t stand you,” Eddie says, and he hopes Richie knows he means the very opposite of that, with all his heart. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Let's go with regular scary.
> 
> (as always, i'm on twitter @hermanngottiieb)


	4. Regular scary

**1992**

The last time Eddie sees the house on Neibolt Street — well, the last time before the  _ real  _ last time, when he’s forty years old and it’s collapsing into the ground — he’s sixteen and biking home from the quarry. For most of his childhood, Eddie would take Neibolt all the way home. It was the fastest way back from the quarry, and he liked to walk by the old church on the corner of Neilbolt and Turner. 

After that summer in 1989, he’s taken the long way home. 

He’s not even sure what makes him turn his bike down the old, once-familiar path that day. Later, he’ll wonder if it was something from the bowels of the house itself, drawing him in. He tries not to think too hard about that. 

The last remaining Losers — Bill, Mike, Richie, and Eddie — spent a late summer afternoon at the quarry. It never feels quite as magical as it used to, these days. As Eddie pedals home, he thinks about how maybe they’ve all just outgrown the childhood wonder, or if it’s just that nothing is quite as magical when half their friends are gone. He’s so lost in thought that he doesn’t realize the direction he’s been biking until he rides past the church and hears the muffled swell of the choir. He slows down, his bike inching forward along the cracked, faded asphalt, as the Neibolt house looms closer. 

Eddie knows he could just turn around, bike back up the street and take the longer way like usual. His mother doesn’t like that it takes him an extra ten minutes to get home nowadays, but Eddie can ride fast if he needs to. Instead, he keeps moving forward, slowly, until he’s right in front of the house. He pops down his foot to hold himself upright on his bike, and stares.

When he was little, Eddie believed that scary things could only exist in the dark. He wasn’t scared of monsters under the bed or in the closet in the middle of the day. But the house on Neibolt Street defies his boyhood logic. In the stark, yellow light of the cloudless afternoon, the house towers above him, menacing. He can remember, vividly, the leper charging him from across the dead lawn. The inhuman growls coming from its broken mouth as it reached for him. Eddie shudders, staring at the boarded-up windows and the sagging, broken front porch. The front door is boarded shut, too, but Eddie knows that doesn’t mean anything. He’s seen that door swing open all on its own, pulling away from the nails that kept the boards in place, like a yawning, beckoning mouth.

_ Eddieeee,  _ he can almost hear now, a rattling breath of a word.  _ What are you looking for?  _

He lets his bike clatter to the ground and steps forward as if in a trance. The toes of his sneakers touch the edge of the front yard, where it meets the pavement. The yard is still yellowed with dead grass, tall and bent over. The sunflowers that had been there three years ago have half-died, too, droopy and missing half their petals, their centers eaten away by birds. The ground is dotted with cigarette butts and amber fragments of broken bottle glass. 

_ What are you looking for?  _ The voice had whispered from the doorway, from the other end of the long, long hallway on the second floor. Eddie moves forward quickly, before he can really think about it, until he reaches the steps up to the porch. He is too aware of his tongue, heavy in his mouth, and the pricking of nervous sweat on his palms. 

He stares at the door. The house is silent, lifeless. Is the door closed? Eddie can’t tell. He moves up the steps, one at a time, listening to the soft groan of the decayed wood as it bears his weight.

The door is cracked open, just a little bit. Eddie tries desperately to remember if they closed it behind them after they left the last time, all of them dirty and sore and Eddie covered in black slime. They must not have shut it. It must have been standing here, slightly ajar, all this time. That has to be the case, because the alternative is that someone or some _ thing  _ opened the door afterwards, and Eddie can’t entertain that thought. 

“You’re dead,” Eddie says out loud, calling through the crack in the door. “You — you’re dead, and we’re not afraid of you anymore. We fucking killed you.” His hands tremble, and he clenches them into fists.

He reaches for the knob, as if moving underwater or in a dream. He just has to check. Just has to peek inside.  _ What are you looking for?  _ the voice asks, again and again, and Eddie is suddenly half-convinced he’s not just hearing it in his memory.

His fingers have nearly wrapped around the doorknob when he hears someone shouting his name, followed by the clattering of a bike hitting the street. Eddie whirls around to see Richie clumsily hopping over both of their bikes and running across the lawn to skid to a stop at the foot of the stairs. His eyes are wide with panic, darting between the door and Eddie’s face. 

“Eds,” Richie says, one foot coming to rest hesitantly on the first porch step. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Uh,” Eddie says. He lets his hand fall limply to his side. He shifts to face Richie a little more, not willing to fully turn his back on the door either. “Just — I was just on my way home.”

Richie’s brow furrows. “What, do you live in this shithole now?” he asks, gesturing to the house, and Eddie shudders with the memory of the clown sneering at him —  _ if you lived here you’d be home by now!  _ Richie must catch the movement, because he climbs the rest of the way up the stairs and puts a hand on Eddie’s shoulder. “Eddie?” he asks, concerned.

“I thought I heard something,” Eddie admits. 

Richie pales, and he shakes his head. “No. We killed It, man, there’s nothing in there. You probably just heard a rat or something.”

“But what if —”

_ “We killed It,”  _ Richie insists. “It has to be dead. I’m not — It  _ has _ to be.”

At times, the intensity of Eddie’s love for Richie startles him — it feels too large for him to carry inside of himself. This is one of those times. He wants to say,  _ don’t worry. If we have to go back, I’d protect you. I’m brave enough to do that, for you. You don’t have to be scared.  _

Whatever pull the Neibolt house had before, that drew Eddie up the stairs and nearly through the door, has released him now. He’s already convincing himself that he imagined the whole thing. He doesn’t know why he even thought he had to look inside — what is he trying to prove, going back in there? This place should be fucking condemned. He lifts his hand to place it over Richie’s on his shoulder, and Richie looks at him, half curious and half nervous. 

The words crawl up from the secret place in Eddie’s ribcage and threaten to spill out of his mouth.  _ What are you looking for?  _ the house asks him, and Eddie knows he’s already found it. If he can just be brave enough to say it out loud — then he won’t feel so haunted by the voice from the house, the voice that lives in the back of his mind. Then he’ll be able to believe it when Richie tells him that Pennywise is dead. 

He opens his mouth to really say it, but he can’t. Maybe it’s the house still looming, or how clammy his hand has gotten on top of Richie’s, or the fact that they’re still sixteen in Derry, but he can’t help but wonder what difference it would make. It’s not like they can do anything about it until they’re far away from here. Bill and Mike have both shown interest in girls, even had some short-lived relationships, but Eddie and Richie have remained conspicuously single, Richie with his clearly false bravado and dirty jokes, and Eddie with his uncomfortable refusal to engage in the conversations anyway. They’re already both so obvious.

Eddie resolves to tell Richie when they’re both eighteen, when they can escape. He’ll be brave, and tell Richie he loves him, and then… he doesn’t know what then, but they’ll figure it out together. He promises himself that.

“Can I come to yours for dinner?” Eddie asks, letting go of Richie’s hand and turning his back on the house. Richie’s hand falls from his shoulder.

“Yeah, ’course you can,” Richie says. “Can we leave this fucking place already?”

Eddie snorts. “Yeah, we’re leaving.” He pauses, almost turning to look at the crack in the door again, and then he shakes his head and follows Richie down the stairs. The back of his neck prickles, like someone is watching them go, but he doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t give it one last glance, even though some morbid part of him wants to — and he never takes Neibolt Street home again.

A year later, Eddie and his mother leave Derry, and the next time Eddie sees the house on Neibolt Street, he’s forty and freshly stabbed and has spent twenty-four years forgetting every brave promise he made to himself on those crumbling steps. 

* * *

**2017**

Richie is in New York — all of the Losers are in New York, for Ben and Beverly’s wedding, but Richie is here, in Eddie’s apartment, the night before the ceremony. It’s late August, just barely more than a year since Derry, and it feels right to replace those nightmarish memories with something better, healing. The prospect of the wedding, and seeing his and Richie’s suits hanging up side by side, it’s got him thinking hard about new beginnings, and love, and memory. 

Eddie’s been debating, in the four months since the half-marathon, about what would happen if he confessed his feelings to Richie. He knows they’re reciprocated, though he’s still not sure if Richie knows the same thing. They live so far away from each other — but that could change. Richie keeps making idle comments about how he’s been antsy in LA, and even if he wasn’t, Eddie would be willing to move. He could find work in California, maybe something he even actively enjoys doing. A fresh start, with nothing from the sham of a life he’s been living lingering like a bad taste in his mouth.

Everything he’s done in the past year, it all feels like a methodical correction of his past. Each new memory he’s been confronted with, Eddie has felt the urge to  _ fix,  _ to make a better version of it that he can smooth over the old one. It’s not even that all the memories are bad. Sometimes the ones that are good hurt even more to think about. Remembering how brave and strong he once was, and how he still fell back into the same old patterns of repression and fear and anxiety, it’s embarrassing. He knows it’s not his fault, but still. He has to course-correct, to revisit every step and do it again, better than before.

So maybe he’s been fixating on this memory of the Neibolt house, of standing there on the steps with Richie and feeling the phantom breath of evil at his back, just beyond the door. Would it have made a difference, if he’d told Richie back then? He still would have moved away a year later, still would have forgotten everything. What was one year, really, in the face of two decades where they’d lost each other and themselves? 

He can’t fix this one, that’s the problem. He can’t go back to those steps and stand in the face of that evil door and kiss Richie like he wanted to back then. Neibolt is gone, swallowed into the earth. There was an incredible catharsis in watching the destruction of the house that embodied his deepest, most secret fear, but now he wishes he’d just —  _ said _ something to Richie, right there on the lawn with all of their friends. He didn’t know what needed saying, back then, but he still wishes he had.

Instead, it’s been a fucking  _ year _ and Richie is sitting on Eddie’s couch in Eddie’s apartment, and two of their best friends are getting married in the morning, and there are twin suits with their sleeves overlapping hanging in the closet like the universe’s most unfunny joke. 

It’s late, and Richie has his feet up on the couch, pressing his socked toes against Eddie’s thigh. They’ve both had a few beers. In Eddie’s bedroom, there’s an air mattress made up for Richie to sleep on. 

They’ve been talking idly about Bev and Ben’s wedding, laughing quietly over nothing in particular, reminiscing on how lovestruck Ben has always been. Richie sets his now-empty beer bottle on the coffee table and sighs, slouching back against the arm of the couch. 

“You think you’ll ever get married again?” he asks, in a faraway sort of voice. Eddie thinks he’s trying to sound offhand, but the slight tension in his jaw gives him away. 

Eddie can feel his own pulse, hot and quick in his neck. He runs his tongue along his teeth, thinking. “I don’t know,” he says finally. “Maybe. I think so, if — if it was the right person.” He looks down at his hands. “What about you? Wait, no, I know your answer already. You’re too anti-establishment for marriage.”

Richie barks out a laugh. “You’d think so, right? I probably should be. But, I dunno. I’ve thought about it. I mean, more recently, anyway. It might be nice, now that we can.”

Eddie’s head jerks up, and he turns to stare at Richie in frantic, almost panicked confusion. Is this — is this happening,  _ now?  _ Is Richie beating him to the punch with a confession?

But Richie just laughs again, sheepish this time, and says, “Us being, you know, my people. The gays.” He says it so flippantly now. Less than a year ago he could barely say the word out loud in reference to himself, and now he jokes about it. Eddie still hasn’t said it at all.

“Right,” Eddie says. He smooths his hands over the legs of his pajama pants. His palms are sweaty. He takes a deep breath through his nose and says on the exhale, “Rich, I’m gay.” He hears Richie inhale like he’s about to speak, and Eddie quickly talks over him. “I, uh, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, I think I’ve known for a while I just — I didn’t know how to say it.”

“Eddie, hey, no, don’t apologize,” Richie says immediately. He sits up more, knees bent, feet still pressed up against Eddie’s leg. “You don’t owe it to me or anyone else.”

“I guess so,” Eddie says. He flicks his gaze over to Richie. Richie, with his big, square head and his left eye squinting slightly as he looks at Eddie from so close, earnest and concerned. Eddie’s eyes trail down to where Richie’s shin is so close to his hand, so Eddie reaches over and grabs it gently, just holding onto it for a point of contact. For all that the two of them can talk incessantly for hours on end, there’s so much they don’t say — and so much they say without any words at all. 

Eddie thinks about the door left ajar in Neibolt for twenty-seven years, and about the door down in the sewers labeled “Regular Scary” that they never opened, and about the closet in his room where the suits are hanging. What would happen if he finally opened all the doors and confronted what’s behind them? He squeezes Richie’s leg. In his mind’s eye, he flings open the door, and there’s nothing on the other side but the two of them. Just Eddie and Richie, Richie and Eddie, how it’s always been. And that’s nothing to be scared of, right?

“Richie,” Eddie says, staring at Richie’s pajama pants because he’s too scared to look him in the eye, and then steeling himself and looking him in the eye anyway, “You know, I — this past year, I’ve been doing a lot of, um, what I’m trying to say is I’ve been trying to — to do shit that I didn’t remember I could do. Reliving the old memories. You know? Like running the marathon. Things like that.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” Richie says. “You’ve been doing a great fucking job, man.” He clears his throat and says, quieter, sounding embarrassed again, “I think you’re like, the best person I know.”

Eddie stares at him, boggled. “I,” he says, and then stops. “Richie,” he says plaintively, “you know, don’t know? You have to know.” He squeezes Richie’s shin again. “I feel like I’m so obvious. Every time I look at you, it must be so fucking obvious.”

He hears Richie’s throat work as he swallows, the quiet click. “I think I know,” he says slowly. “I didn’t want to say anything until you were ready.”

“Why?” Eddie asks. It would be so much easier if Richie would just  _ do  _ something already. “If you knew all this time.”

Richie laughs then, and it’s not one of the many laughs that Eddie has privately catalogued and ranked. It’s barely a breath, almost inaudible. “Maybe I just wanted to hear you say it,” he admits.

And because Eddie is brave, and Neibolt is gone, and Richie is here, Eddie says, “I love you. I’m in love with you. You make me feel insane and so fucking  _ good _ and I want to be with you all the time. You make me feel like — like I just ran a marathon. I felt so good doing that, like I knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing and who I was supposed to be, and you make me feel like that all the time.” 

Richie gapes slightly. “I — wasn’t expecting all of that,” he says.

Eddie swats at his leg. “What the fuck! You said you knew!”

That earns him a chuckle. “I knew you  _ loved  _ me, I just didn’t know, like — you  _ really  _ love me, huh?”

Eddie rolls his eyes. Now that he’s said it, he’s flooded with relief and adrenaline. He could run laps around his apartment. He could run down the fucking block. He shifts on the couch, drawing his legs up under himself so he can turn to face Richie. “Yeah, I really do,” he says. He leans forward, reaching, and cups Richie’s face in both hands so he can kiss him. 

Richie holds Eddie close, strong hands between Eddie’s shoulder blades, pressing their bodies together, knees overlapping. Eddie traces Richie’s strong, square jaw; the soft curve of his ear; the bristly hair of his sideburns. Richie kisses him slow and open-mouthed, gentle with just a little bit of tongue. It’s not something wild and heated — it just simmers, warming Eddie in his core, right in the spot where his love for Richie was kept secret. 

“I love you,” Richie breathes, pulling back. “Hey, Eddie, I love you too.”

“I know,” Eddie says, bumping their noses together. “Nice of you to say it back, though, thanks for that.”

Richie laughs against Eddie’s mouth. “You distracted me. I didn’t expect such a long-winded confession.”

“Oh my god, shut  _ up,”  _ Eddie groans, and then Richie laughs again and kisses him until he pulls a different kind of groan from Eddie’s lips. 

Some time later, Richie breaks the kiss again, and Eddie tucks his face into the crook of Richie’s neck, breathing in. Richie’s fingers scratch idly at the short hair at the nape of Eddie’s neck. He starts snickering, and Eddie hums in question without lifting his head. 

“I was just thinking,” Richie says, “Bev and Ben are gonna be so pissed we got together the day before their wedding.”

“It’s after midnight,” Eddie points out. “So technically we got together  _ on  _ their wedding day.”

“They’re gonna  _ kill  _ us,” Richie says gleefully. 

“I had this whole plan when we were kids,” Eddie tells him, sitting up so he can see Richie’s face. “I was gonna tell you when we turned eighteen, so we could run away together.” 

Richie’s smile softens. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I was thinking — we don’t have to decide right now, but I was thinking maybe you could move here to New York? Or I can move to California, either way. We can talk about it.”

“What I said before, about marriage?” Richie says, instead of answering him. “I was thinking about you. That’s what made me realize I could want it. I’d like to be married to you someday.”

Eddie tries not to tear up at that and fails miserably. “Is that a yes to moving in together, then?” he jokes in a wobbly voice.

Richie, looking distinctly emotional himself, nods. “Yeah, I’d like that too. Let’s do your thing first.” 

As predicted, Bev and Ben give them grief for their timing, but all of their friends are happy for them, and the wedding has everyone emotional and affectionate. During the reception, as they watch Bev and Ben twirl across the dance floor, Richie nudges Eddie and says, “So, what’s next on the list, Eds?”

“Hm?” Eddie is pleasantly buzzed on champagne and the comfortable closeness of Richie. 

“You know, all the shit from when we were kids that you’ve been reliving,” Richie says. “What’s next?”

Eddie thinks about it. He’s got a lot of shit to choose from, that’s for sure. But the urgency isn’t quite there anymore. He shakes his head, reaching out to loop his arm around Richie’s waist and lean into him. “I think maybe I’m done with that for now,” he says. “I think maybe it’s time I just start doing new shit. Stop trying to figure out who I was back then and just be whoever the fuck I am now.”

Richie kisses the top of his head firmly. “I think that sounds like a great fuckin’ idea.” 

So Eddie lets the old door at Neibolt finally, finally swing shut. It’s time to stop looking back for pieces of what could have been, and look forward to who he  _ is  _ — and Eddie thinks that it’s finally someone who he’s ready to be. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that's a wrap! thanks so much to everyone who read and commented on this fic — it's been a little labor of love and something i've wanted to complete for a while now, so i'm really glad i finally got to get this story out there and that you liked it! comments are always so so appreciated, i'd love to know what you thought! :) 
> 
> i'm on twitter @hermanngottiieb if you wanna talk reddie, come say hi! see y'all next time.


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